1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a system and method for phonetic searching of data.
2. Description of Related Art
Distributed File Systems (DFS) allow access to files from multiple hosts via a computer network. This makes it possible for multiple processors to share files and storage resources and for example to access and process data in parallel. Distributed file systems may include facilities for transparent replication and fault tolerance, that is, when a limited number of nodes in a file system go offline, the system continues to work without any data loss.
DFS are particularly useful for providing access to large data sources particularly for parallel processing and searching and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is an example of one such open source DFS.
Hurence Hadoop Audio Miner is a product employed in call centers for performing audio to text transcription of source audio files, typically recordings of client contacts on the Hadoop platform. A Hadoop-based text mining engine is then used to perform searches on behalf of users.
It should be appreciated that in order to make audio files text searchable, significant computational effort is required to generate a textual transcription of the original media files and for large or rapidly increasing bodies of media files, it may not be feasible to provide the processing resources to implement this approach. Even where a transcript is produced, such a transcript contains many incorrectly transcribed words, preventing successful searching. Separately, once text files have been extracted from an audio source, they are typically relatively small and so providing local access to this information to search engines is not critical in providing reasonable performance.
On the hand phonetic searching does not create the same processing demands for indexing files, but local access to indexed information is important for performing phonetic searching.
Nexidia Search GRID provides a REST-based development environment where applications use multiple machines in parallel to provide phonetic searching.
Separately, the Aurix Phonetic Speech Search Engine allows high volumes of recordings to be processed, with less hardware power than with conventional Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) systems. The Aurix Engine allows audio to be indexed at high rates with the index files being compressed as they are generated.
Nonetheless, expanding such offerings to deal with large scale media sources continually and possibly rapidly generating media files as well as handling search requests raises problems in: (1) the generation and storage of the index data, (2) the management of the generated index data to accommodate the dynamically changing nature of the target media corpus, and (3) the retrieval of the stored index data on demand for media searching.